In England and France, landscape as a separate art has only made considerable headway quite recently, though there have been local schools, as the Norwich and Barbizon, which followed particular methods in design. Meanwhile England produced some isolated giants in landscape, as Wilson, Gainsborough, Turner, and Constable, Turner standing out as the greatest painter of strong sun effects on record. It will be seen that until the last generation or so, in no country has landscape been admitted to high rank as a separate art, universal opinion very properly recognizing that the highest beauty in the handiwork of man is to be found in the representation of the human figure. Profound efforts of the imagination are not required in landscape, for it consists of a particular arrangement of inanimate signs which have no direct influence upon the mind, and cannot appeal to the higher faculties. There is no scope therein for lofty conceptions, and consequently the sensorial beauty exhibited must be very high to have more than a quickly passing effect upon the observer. This high beauty is most difficult to obtain, and can only be reached by those who have a supreme knowledge of the technique of their art; who have made a long and close study of natural signs and effects; and who are possessed of uncommon patience and industry. We need not be surprised that scarcely one out of every hundred landscape painters executes a work which lasts a generation, and not one out of a thousand secures a permanent place on the roll of art. The man who does not give his life from his youth up, to his work, concentrating his whole energy upon it, to the exclusion of everything else, will paint only inferior landscapes. The four greatest landscape painters known to us are Claude and Turner in distance work, and Hobbema and Jacob Ruysdael in near-ground. Claude was labouring for twenty-five years before he succeeded in accomplishing a single example of those lovely fairy abodes so forcibly described by Goethe as "absolute truth without a sign of reality." Turner took more than twenty years to master the secrets of Claude; Jacob Ruysdael spent a quarter of a century in working out to perfection the representation of flowing water, and Hobbema passed through more than half of his long life before arriving at his superlative scheme of increasing his available distance by throwing in a powerful sunlight from the back of his trees. And a long list of landscape painters of lesser lustre might be given, who went through from fifteen to thirty years of painstaking labour before executing a single first-class picture.